We sat down with a few of our customers with the most sensitive networks and observed how various Traffic Metrics were responding to real life situations. This helped us develop a simple yet effective “Threshold Band” feature that we are releasing now. Essentially Trisul now lets you attach ‘threshold bands’ to any metric. Once you attach a band, Trisul automatically calculates an upper and lower bound for that metric for each time-of-day and day-of-week combination. The concept itself is old, but we have made it really easy to attach any metric to a band, which is automatically recomputed every night.

Actual metric shown against gray band of expected values

Currently we are using this to alert on statistical movement of a number of metrics such as

total bandwidth

concurrent flows : helped detect a DoS situation

netflow volumes

volumes of top 3 customers with revenue impact : if traffic below lower bound results in $ loss for them

number of flows being setup up / sec

number of flows terminated / sec

You can track any of the hundreds of thousands of metrics this way. In our next maintenance release, we are rolling out a
Read more about this feature in our Threshold Band Anomaly alert docs

Self monitoring

A new dashboard called Perf Stats now tracks metrics about Trisul’s own memory, CPU, disk usage. Quite surprisingly spikes in these third order metrics have led us to interesting findings.

Active Keys Monitor

A new dashboard keeps track of how many unique keys (entities) are being monitored in each counter group. The use cases are to get a really good visibility of ‘unique things’ in your network from various viewpoints. Trisul can also track Unique X or Y using Cardinality counters. See the post on Hyperloglog counters

Trends of unique items being tracked in every counter group

New historical chart use interface

Now you can click on the ‘chart’ icon on any module to expand the chart to days or weeks.

Clicking on the highlighted icon brings up the explorer window as shown below

Zoom into any metrics without losing context

p.

Other changes

On the backend there are several exciting changes

LUA Scripting functionality has been added to counter group items

Automatic recovery of crashed databases in rare cases of power failure

New Netflow dashboards

New License page

Many UI fixes such as the ability to add any item to the menu in a single click